Her face was the last one I expected to see, but it riled me from the very moment I saw it. As I stormed across the tent toward one of the side flaps leading outside, she disappeared from view with only a flare of opalescent hair as evidence of her presence. She would not get away so easily.

I smacked the flap aside and rounded on her. She had not fled as I anticipated she might, but she was looking incredibly wary, and her muscles were visibly tensed in preparation of a quick getaway should the circumstances suit. I towered over her, my shoulders rising and falling with the deep breaths I was taking to keep myself calm. She looked back at me with defiance in her all-too-familiar eyes.

“Was the wedding not message enough?” I snarled irately. “Have you grown incapable of understanding when you are unwanted?”

Ola glared at me, lifting herself up onto the balls of her feet to better match my height. “Have you grown so cold that you are willing to forsake your own sister eternally?” she snapped back with an equal volume of venom in her voice.

“We have had this discussion more times than I ever cared to,” I dismissively replied. “For whatever reason, you continue to insist on thrusting yourself upon those of us who wish you gone from our lives, and you do so at the most selfish and inopportune times to boot. Clearly, you possess no consideration for the happy moments of the family for whom you claim to so dearly yearn.”

She looked worse than I had ever seen her, including when she had shown up to Zuran’s wedding. Her cheeks were now so sunken they were concave and shadowed; her eyes appeared to have retracted inches into her skull; her chin and cheekbones were so pronounced they could have acted as blades. Though her hair was as lovely as it ever was in its radiant hue, it was matted together like a nest and discernably dingy in finish. Her figure was diminished to a pathetic stick of a shape without a single muscle to be seen, and I would have been willing to wager she had not eaten a proper meal in weeks, if not months.

“What has happened to you?” I asked. I did not wish her to mistake the question for deep-seated concern, but the brotherly part of my soul was sympathetic to her plight just enough to at least want to hear an explanation for her gaunt appearance.

“I have lost everything. That is my plight,” she retorted. “And it is your doing.”

“Come, now, surely you have not regressed to blaming others for your faults, Ola,” I said a little tauntingly.

She sneered unpleasantly at me. “All I want is to be reunited with Mother and Father and you and Zuran,” she bit. “Why do you refuse to even consider my request?”

“Why do you bring the request to me?” I shot back. “You could just as easily approach Mother or Father. Of anyone in the family, Mother is most likely to give it some thought.”

“Because you are an Elder, Venan.” She spoke as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. “You have the authority to tell them they need to give me a chance. If I ask it of them, they may just say no and leave it at that. If you tell them they must, then they must. Can you not see why I would come to you first?”

“You are asking me to use my authority to influence an unpolitical situation. I will not do that.”

She stamped her foot and thrust an arm sideways, pointing aggressively at the tent. “Then, fetch Zuran. Bring him out here, and we can discuss this as a family. Maybe he can talk some sense into your stubborn head.”

“I will do no such thing, Ola. As silly as I think this is, we are here to celebrate Zuran’s unborn child. The last thing he needs to be thinking about today is his morally-questionable sister,” I rejected. “And, I might add, it would not be in your favor for me to tell Zuran you are here and ask him to come have a conversation with you.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“He is the angriest with you, and that evaluation includes Khrel,” I told her. “If he knew you were here, he would very probably kill you on the spot just to ensure you are nowhere near his expecting wife. He loathes you, Ola, and I doubt he will ever find it within himself to trust you again. Your transgression affected him deeply, not only because it was an awful betrayal but because you cost him a valued friendship.”

Ola flung her head, whipping strands of hair through the air. “And you?” she persisted. “Will you ever find it within yourself to trust me again?”

“I sincerely doubt it,” I replied icily.

A corner of her lips curled down, and her eyes became nothing more than lashed lines on her once-pretty face. She shot a look at the tent as if considering stalking back inside and finding Zuran for herself, but another look back at me convinced her otherwise.

“You will regret this,” she intoned, her voice becoming low and gravelly. “I can promise you that, Elder brother. You will regret it.”

“I will regret not allowing you to ruin a special day in our brother’s life?” I snickered. “I sincerely doubt that too.”

“Make your comments. Make your jokes. I do not care anymore.” She was starting to back away, still facing me but easing backward slow step by slow step. “I have come to you, civilized and composed. I have been angry, perhaps, but you cannot take it upon yourself to consider for even the smallest fraction of a second why I might be feeling this way. You look at me and you see a traitor, nothing else. Well, you will regret it, Elder Venan. You will regret your cold heart and your thoughtlessness and your arrogance. I will repay you in kind, believe me, and I assure you I know just how to do it.”

Streams of hair snapped as she spun on her heel, and she ran down the length of the tent, where she turned its corner and disappeared from sight.